The railway station at the Chełmno death camp 

The National Socialists were the ultimate in cynics. They understood the depravity of human beings and the tendency of people to fear facing the truth. They knew that one can make a crime so large that people will not believe it. They knew that big crimes require big proof. They knew that rural people are scattered, not sophisticated and in their time "not to be believed". If someone wants to commit a large crime, do it in an "out of the way" place. Do it briskly and without shame. After you have done your dirty business, cover it up. In a generation nobody will believe it. They won't see it.

I bet the landowners know

@@olafjensen4508 Witam prosze pana nie ladnie wspominac o tamtych zlych czasa byla wojna wiec szyscy wiedza ja bym nie napisal tak moze w inny sposob niech pani pamieta ten wpis czyta caly swiat a moze czyta ktos z tej miejscowosci jestem rocznik 1964 slazakiem Polakiem moi dziatkowe byli niemcami tak wiec mnie ten wpis zabolal gdyz piszac prawde o moich dziatkach to jeden brat od strony dziatka sluzyl w tym obozie byl w ss. mi nie jest to milo pisac ale pamietac trzeba ze takimi wpisami rani pani slazakow i pomorzan a takze ludzi co mieszkali na ziemiach niemieckich ( zachodnich ) pozdrawiam Darek Bytom ( slask ) Poland 10.06.2024

I was there in July but as you can see, despite the weather on every other day, it was pouring down. I saw the glass cover but the rain was so strong I did not film it.

I was there last year and being the only visitor as well. Correct, big contrast compared to Auschwitz. But also Bełzec, Sobibor and Treblinka had more visitors when I was there. It's important Chełmno nad Nerem and it's history should not be forgotten!

@@ewlke I think that there is more knowledge of these places now than there was when I started taking an interest in them in the 1990s.

"I was last there last year, and one of the friendly and helpful curators said that I was the only visitor that day" That's very sad. I still remember from the documentary "Shoah" when that little old lady said of the vans. "I was a little girl when I saw those vans. We called them 'hell vans'. The screaming that came from them as they drove down the road. I told my my Mother 'the hells are going'. Simon Srebnik came to a site where the bodies were disposed of..... he was such a dear man, polite and kind.". Mr. Lanzmann had to coax him to come back to Poland. I still remember Simon standing in front of that Church, listening to those foolish comments about Jews and God's retribution and so on. I thought to myself, "Good Simon... be the bigger man". I bet he couldn't wait to get back on the plane and go home.

@@HistoryonRU-vid The thing that bothers me about the Holocaust is how people want to ignore it because they feel that they should feel guilty about it. Nobody deserves to feel guilty. Nobody has the right to ignore it. Mass movements with malignant tendencies are going to rise up again. When they do, people should not turn their heads away.

I think I need to redo them and when I was there in July when this was filmed, talked of doing just that. Unfortunately not all the sites are available, the mill is now private property and out of bounds and where the railway line was is even harder to find than it was 15 years ago.

You mentioned the United States; believe it or not, the USA literally TAUGHT the Nazis this particular brand of evil!

I would like to go to Izbica. Tovi Blatt's childhood home is gone now. The fool who was looking for "jewgold" trashed the building. There is a vacant lot full of rubbish and brush there now. One Sunflower grows there. There is something poetic about that single sunflower. Edit - the sunflower was not there in the latest photo. Hopefully someone will plant another.

Interested parties can see Mr. Blatt's childhood home. He began his early life in Izbica Poland The home is on Stokawa street, off of Lubelska. There are street views of it.

Unfortunately it collapsed a few years ago - I don't know what state it is in now - I tried to look as we drove past in November.

I drove through in November. I was not driving and did not want to ask to stop as the journey was very long and we had just started in Lublin. I will make another effort to go there!

@@HistoryonRU-vid "I don't know what state it is in now - I tried to look as we drove past in November." Looks like a heap of rubble. As he told in one of his books - he tried to come back to Izbica. The locals tried to murder him. A Soviet transport allowed him to ride out of town on a vehicle. Later Mr. Blatt joined the Polish government as part of its secret police. I smile thinking of him paying his old hometown a discrete visit. I would have done so, not for revenge but to promote some contrition. "We have some antisocial elements here... we must exercise vigilance against back sliding into national socialism". Local police would say to various people "Warsaw came to visit. They are watching us".

I was there, I slept there in my motorhome in the car park.

I sure hope not. If anyone deserves an express elevator to Heaven, away from this vale of tears and cares, it's those who were killed by the national socialists. I would hate to think that their spirits haunt this world of ours.

Mine too.

I suppose that they must have got very suspicious when forced down the corridor that led to the gas van but up until that point, they may have been comparably calm. It was not like the Bug river camps where the victims almost certainly did know.

At Bełżec, everyone talked about it - in the summer of 1943 it was so bad that everyone had to keep all their windows closed in the heat of the summer.

@@HistoryonRU-vid I majored in history and wrote a paper once researching how much America “knew” in terms of the Holocaust. What I discovered within my research was so interesting. The World Jewish Congress had received information from camp escapees by 1944, yet we still didn’t make any rescue attempts. Although, I do understand both sides from what I have read, not so sure I would have made the same decisions.

@@Dropitlikeitshotspot Btw, did you know that Hitler learned this particular brand of evil from the careful study of American history?! He mentioned it in "Mein Kamph"....

Absolutely NO DIFFERENT from those in the United States living near plantation sites....

There is a problem putting links in, it was not even in the spam folder which I checked now. Unfortunately there is so much abuse of the comments section that even the RU-vidr has no acccess to it.

The ones who cannot keep their stories straight are you racist Holocaust denier liars.

@@HistoryonRU-vid thanks for letting me know, Alan. If you're interested you can find it on the ushmm website. It literally has hundreds of hours of footage that didn't make it to the final version of Shoah

@@ewlke I have seen quite a lot of it - mainly from Chełmno as it poured down when I was there in July. It is possible that my great aunt was killed there although I don't know that for certain. She was in the Łódź ghetto.

@@HistoryonRU-vid if she was from the Łódź ghetto she was probably deported to Chełmno. But during the liquidation of the ghetto, the Germans changed plans and had the last transports go to Auschwitz instead. Maybe one day you will find out what happened to her

It depends on how much time you have. You could go into Koło as the ghetto buildings are largely still standing as they are in many parts of the Łódź ghetto (and for that matter other places too). Apparently there is no longer access to the location of the former mill building where prisoners were held for their final night before being taken to Chełmno to be murdered. You can still follow the location of the single track railway line from Koło - formerly it was from what is today platform 3 at Koło station (if memory serves me correctly). Here is my playlist from 2008 : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eOrSv8iN5GU.html

So many great books: Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews is a classic text that has stood the test of time. 📖 And, more recently, Dan Stone's The Holocaust: an unfinished history is quite illuminating and has fresh perspectives. Finally, Ian Kershaw's Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution is very compelling. Few books will tell you more than you need to know than SHOAH. You've already been versed by the Master. His film is genius. Hope that helps......

@@derekdalton5658 I read Kershaw and Hilberg but I'll be sure to check out Stone. Thank you for the recommendation.

@@derekdalton5658 What about William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"?!

AND WHY IN THE HELL NOT?!

The Final Solution started that way with the Einsatzgruppen. Over time, however, Himmler came to see mass shooting as inefficient and damaging to his mens' morale. This led to combining killing techniques developed by the Einsatzgruppen with the gassing being performed by the T4 euthanasia program: the results were the Operation Reinhard extermination camps (which includes Chelmno),

@@robertschneck8583 and taking dead bodies out of a van day after day wouldn't be damaging to morale? How can it be more efficient than shooting and killing someone right where you have already dug the grave?

Most of the victims were in cities, so shooting them there is hardly an option. As for taking victims out of a van day after day, it was not the Nazis but the victims themselves who were forced to do this.

"Why go through with gassing when it would be more efficient to shot them where they found them? Same objective." Actually, shooting is not more efficient than gas. You have to get shooters, discrete and reliable. A back of the head shot helps with morale, but people on the edge of death will complain, scream and carry on. The National Socialists prized "order" and "efficiency". Still, shooting was tried. First in Poland with special police units, to "manage" Poles who were not hip on joining Greater Germany. Later on a massive scale in the occupied Soviet Union. About 1,500,000 people, mostly Jews, were shot and buried. There are still graves that were not "remediated" by Aktion 1005 there. Himmler attended a mass shooting. He got some brains on his pretty field coat. He became physically ill. One of his deputies saw this and decided to give Himmler the bad news. He told him that men were suffering from "breakdowns". The SS were issued hefty rations of liquor. They were given leaves. Nothing seemed to work. "We are destroying these men" Ever the attentive leader, Himmler gave a speech on 'hardness'. This mollified his officers. Himmler realized that his SS could become "either neurotics or killers". Himmler was not happy with the "rate of disposal". Research was done to use a "better method". Gas was used for the sake of the killers. Gas is impersonal. Gas allowed for an orderly "disposal" of "unwanted people". Nobody is killed, you just throw a switch, turn a valve. At first mobile units, then stationary units that used carbon monoxide. Zyklon B was actually cheaper and more reliable than CO. At the Reinhard Camps they had problems with engine reliability. Zyklon B was well understood, easy to manage and thrifty.

@@HistoryonRU-vid " As for taking victims out of a van day after day, it was not the Nazis but the victims themselves who were forced to do this." One has to admire the pure cynicism of the SS. I assign them a grudging admiration, "giving the devil his due". I despise them, as any decent person should. I think that every one of them needed the gas after a legal judgment. The SS command reckoned that a frightened "work Jew" would, if starved and abused enough, adopt a survival mindset. They would do whatever was asked of them "just to live another day". Underfeeding them, exposing them to nuisance diseases and tribulations, and taking advantage of frequent doses of terror. Every camp had their marauders, their scourges, their petty tormentors of "work Jews". Jewish doctrine considered the dead to be impure, yet one must respect the dead out of consideration for the living. This wholesome ethic was turned upside down. The SS sought to corrupt the work Jews, to soil them spiritually and morally before extinguishing them as people? Perhaps the SS learned this from their own experiences on the Western Front? That horrible cauldron of death? Maybe they learned from handling animals for slaughter, how to manage transport to get the condemned to go along with the process. Maybe the SS men learned from the Bavarian Socialist Republic? Maybe from the Soviets? The Soviets had keen insight into people too. The National Socialists trained with the Red Army in the 1930s in order to skirt around the Versailles treaty. Maybe they got some lessons from the NKVD too? Maybe SS men visited the Gulag to learn how to manage prisoners? Maybe after the Wehrmacht conquered the USSR records were checked and methods were reviewed? I've read Levi, Blatt, Glazar and many others. These were intelligent and insightful men, men who reported this demonic intelligence at work.